Quote of the week
Mr Zuma is no ordinary litigant. He is the former President of the Republic, who remains a public figure and continues to wield significant political influence, while acting as an example to his supporters… He has a great deal of power to incite others to similarly defy court orders because his actions and any consequences, or lack thereof, are being closely observed by the public. If his conduct is met with impunity, he will do significant damage to the rule of law. As this Court noted in Mamabolo, “[n]o one familiar with our history can be unaware of the very special need to preserve the integrity of the rule of law”. Mr Zuma is subject to the laws of the Republic. No person enjoys exclusion or exemption from the sovereignty of our laws… It would be antithetical to the value of accountability if those who once held high office are not bound by the law.
Secretary of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture, Corruption and Fraud in the Public Sector including Organs of State v Zuma and Others (CCT 52/21) [2021] ZACC 18
Gevisser: Mbeki admits he is still an AIDS dissident
Ever wondered why President Thabo Mbeki has failed to fire Health Minister Manto Tshabalala Msimang despite her disastrous tenure? Apparently the new biography of President Thabo Mbeki by Mark Gevisser provides some answers. The London Guirdian reports this morning that the President had admitted to Gevisser that he was still an AIDS dissident. The paper continues:
Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred describes how the president contacted the author earlier this year to reiterate some of the views that caused uproar in the medical community before Mr Mbeki stopped talking publicly about Aids several years ago. Mr Gevisser also describes how the president’s view of the disease was shaped by an obsession with race, the legacy of colonialism and “sexual shame”.The book will reinforce the view of Mr Mbeki’s critics who say his unorthodox opinions have cost hundreds of thousands of lives by delaying the distribution of medicines, and that the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, has continued these views.
Mr Gevisser recounts how Mr Mbeki phoned him late on a Saturday evening in June to discuss Aids. The president asked the respected Johannesburg author whether he had seen a 100-page paper secretly authored by Mr Mbeki and distributed anonymously among the ANC leadership six years ago. It compared Aids scientists to latter-day Nazi concentration camp doctors and portrayed black people who accepted orthodox Aids science as “self-repressed” victims of a slave mentality. It describes the “HIV/Aids thesis” as entrenched in “centuries-old white racist beliefs and concepts about Africans”.
The author said he did have a copy but the next day a driver from the presidency arrived with an updated and expanded version. “There is no question as to the message Thabo Mbeki was delivering to me along with this document: he was now, as he had been since 1999, an Aids dissident,” the author writes.
Mr Gevisser says he asked Mr Mbeki why he allowed Aids to absorb him.
The president replied: “It’s the way it was presented! You see, the presentation of the matter, which is actually quite wrong, is that the major killer disease on the African continent is HIV/Aids, this is really going to decimate the African population! So your biggest threat is not unemployment or racism or globalisation, your biggest threat which will really destroy South Africa is this one!”
Yet, as the book points out, the government’s own statistics show the effect of Aids in South Africa has been “catastrophic” with more than 2 million people already dead and one in eight of the working-age population infected with HIV.
And yet, half the branches of the ANC has renominated this man to be President of the Party. What are they smoking?
